Nasqi: Strategy, Sound Changes

My strategy for developing Nasqi is to start by creating a protolanguage and applying successive changes.

At the earliest stage, the phonology is very simple: 8 consonants and 5 vowels with only CV syllables.
C represents consonants: *p, *t, *k, *s, *b, *d, *g, *l.
V represents vowels: *i, *e, *a, *o, *u (the usual suspects).

The stress will be on the first syllable. Secondary stress will develop on odd syllables, leaving even syllables unstressed. This leads to one of the first sound changes: unstressed high vowels drop out, leaving the consonant to become the coda of the previous syllable. That is,
*CVci ==> CVC and
*CVcu ==> CVC .

Note: Upper case letters will be used for stressed or stressable syllables and lower case letters for unstressed or unstressable ones. This doesn't apply to phonetic symbols of course.

There will then a number of changes to the consonants, based on what each one occurs next to. The actual changes and their sequence hasn't been finalized, but I have a preliminary table ( here )

In a later change, (unstressed) *e and *o will be raised to [i] and [u], respectively.

One consonant change not shown in the table is that the [h] resulting from *s between vowels will disappear when unstressed. This causes the 2 vowels to form a diphthong or a long vowel. Again, I have a preliminary table ( here )

The resulting syllable types are:
CV -- short stressable
cv -- short unstressable
CVC -- long stressable (with coda consonant)
CVV -- long stressable (with long nucleus)

The list of phones occurring is ( here )

Note: I've used phonetic notation, but possibly phonemic notation would be better, since the phonetic values are only approximate here, and there will probably be variation not yet shown. On the other hand I haven't attempted a real phonemic analysis.

*** corrected a couple of typos 2004-06-14 08:08 ***